Smart home, built right.

Home Assistant · Dashboards

Home Assistant dashboards: the complete guide

How Home Assistant dashboards work in 2026: views, the Sections layout, cards, badges, visibility, community cards, tablets and phones, with links to every step-by-step guide.

By the TechnoGecko Team· · Updated · 7 min read

A Home Assistant Sections-view dashboard in dark mode from our test setup, with tiles for Front Porch Lights, Christmas Tree and Garage Outlet, a weather forecast card and holiday automation toggles (virtual test entities).

A Home Assistant dashboard is the screen you and your household see when you open the app: which lights are on, the temperature in each room, who’s home. You don’t have to build one. Home Assistant generates a dashboard from your devices out of the box. When you’re ready to make your own, start a new dashboard, use the Sections view (the default), add Tile cards for the things you control most, and put at-a-glance states in badges across the top. This guide explains how the pieces fit together and links to our step-by-step guides for each part.

The pieces, from biggest to smallest

PieceWhat it isWhere you change it
DashboardA whole screen in the sidebar, such as “Home” or “Kitchen tablet”. You can have several.Settings > Dashboards
ViewA tab inside a dashboard. Each view has a layout type.Edit the dashboard, then the + button in the top bar
SectionA group of cards in the Sections view, usually with a heading.Create section, in the Sections view
CardOne block that shows or controls something: a light, a graph, a camera.Add card
BadgeA small chip at the top of a view showing a state, like a temperature or who’s home.Add badge, in the view header

Built-in dashboards vs your own

Home Assistant ships with built-in dashboards that build themselves from your devices and areas: Home, Activity, Energy, History, Map and To-do lists in the sidebar, plus Lights, Security, Climate and Maintenance dashboards listed under Settings > Dashboards. You can’t delete the built-in dashboards, and you can only edit them in limited ways. You also can’t add views to them.

For anything custom, create your own dashboard under Settings > Dashboards. A common pattern is one detailed dashboard for you, a simpler one for the family, and a focused one for a wall tablet.

Views: pick Sections unless you have a reason not to

Home Assistant has four view types:

Each view can have a title or icon, its own theme and a background. You can also hide a view from specific users. If you have an older Masonry view, Home Assistant can migrate its content into a Sections view. You can’t convert a Sections view back to another type.

Two Sections settings are worth knowing. Max number of sections wide caps how many columns appear on a wide screen. Dense section placement lets Home Assistant fill gaps automatically, at the cost of some control over the order.

A Home Assistant Sections-view dashboard in edit mode on a test setup, showing the section grid, the badges row and the add-card placeholders.
Sections view in edit mode on our test setup: the section grid, the badges row, and the add-card placeholders.

Our upcoming step-by-step guide to the Sections view walks through a full build.

Cards: start with Tile and Heading

Cards fall into a few groups in Home Assistant’s docs:

You can add a card two ways: by entity (pick the entities, then a card from the preview) or by card (browse the card list). Many cards support features, such as a brightness slider on a Tile card, plus custom tap actions and headers and footers.

Badges, visibility and per-user dashboards

Badges sit in the view header and suit states you want at a glance: outside temperature, open windows, who’s home. They support tap actions. Sidebar and Panel views don’t support badges.

Visibility is how one dashboard can serve everyone. You can show a card, a badge or a whole section only to specific users, or only under conditions, like a state or the screen width. The conditions match the Conditional card’s. If you set several conditions, all of them have to be true. That’s the foundation for phone layouts and for hiding admin controls from the kids.

Community cards: Mushroom, Bubble Card and the Marketplace

Home Assistant’s built-in cards cover most needs. Community cards add different styles and behaviors. Two of the most popular are Mushroom, a set of clean, minimal cards, and Bubble Card, known for pop-ups and mobile navigation.

There are two ways to install them:

Community cards are made by their authors, not the Home Assistant project. Check a project’s recent activity before you rely on it, and remember that a card left unmaintained can break after a Home Assistant update.

Our upcoming Mushroom vs Bubble Card comparison builds the same dashboard with each.

Tablets, wall panels and phones

The same dashboard works in a browser, the Home Assistant app on a phone, or a tablet on the wall. What changes is the layout and the hardware:

YAML, if you want it

You can build everything in the visual editor. If you’d rather copy and paste, every dashboard can also be edited as YAML through the raw configuration editor: edit the dashboard (pencil icon), open the three-dot menu and select Raw configuration editor. To keep a dashboard in files instead, Home Assistant’s multiple dashboards docs explain how to set up a dashboard in YAML mode from configuration.yaml, including loading resources there. Our upcoming dashboard YAML library will have versioned YAML you can paste in: core-cards-only versions plus Mushroom and Bubble Card variants.

Every guide in this series

Live now:

Coming soon:

Want to try before you build? Home Assistant’s interactive demo lets you click around a full dashboard in your browser.

How pages like this are made: How we work.

Sources

Related

The short list

New guides and explainers when we publish them. No product spam. The form is not connected yet. Use the RSS feed.